#and there were handwringers out and about

[jlf23tumble]

your tags……elaborate please?

There are some assholes who think Harry is queerbaiting, which is utter bullshit on so many levels, but is he larrybaiting? I think he *does* do it from time to time, but it's hard to tell for sure because people will fucking REACH on a dime, so it's a maybe so/maybe not for me. But yeah, I do love to think in my own head that he's a masterbaiter who likes to fuck in blues and greens (as does Louis, if you want my UO)

[batboyblog]

hey thanks for not being super doomer over these anti-trans bills. i kept on seeing so many people being defeated over them and it messed up my mental health for a while, like nothing could be done. but you did bring up some good points and shed some light onto people who are actively fighting for us so i thank you again

The queer movement, in the US any ways, has always been cyclical, we make big gains and push forward, then there's a super scary backlash. We're right now at the hight of a really scary backlash thats focused on trans people in particular but is anti-queer more generally. It's intense but its important to remember these backlashes don't generally last very long, they are scary, but each time they've happened, the mid to late 1970s, the 1980s, the early 2000s, the tide has gone out and gay rights, LGBT rights, and society's acceptance of LGBT people has been farther along than before they have never ever managed to turn us back in the years since Stonewall.

And as intense and scary as this is in some ways it's better than last time, when I was a gay teenager. in those days... in 2004 and 2008 the Democrats running for President were uniformly against gay marriage (the big issue of that time) they were trying to get us to settle for the not marriage alternative of civil unions. Only a handful of Congresspeople (some of them gay themselves) in DEEP! blue districts dared to support gay marriage outright. Today the Democratic Party is the most pro-LGBT major political party in the world, you had the President and every Democrat of any note making statements for TDOV a few days ago and you're not seeing even red state Democrats back down and agree to be "a little transphobic" for votes. It felt a lot more lonely last time when it was us and a handful of allies fighting the backlash with most of the Democratic Party on the side lines handwringing and saying "well can't you wait?"

any ways this movement is and will always be a struggle, the rights we've won, the acceptance we've received has never just been given, it's been won, through hard work. Everyone has to dedicate themselves to work in their corner of the earth to the best of their abilities and to push themselves past what they think they can do. That means hooking up with LGBT rights groups on the ground to protest, to rally, to try to support and comfort those queer people who are down and out in whatever way right now, it means digging deep and having hard and awkward conversations with the people in your life, if you're gay or trans or whatever and you got that one aunt/uncle/cousin/whoever in your life that loves you to bits but you know still votes Republican and you just don't bring it up because you don't want to hurt the relationship... have the talk keep having the talk as many times as you need to. Tell your grandparents if they don't know, tell your parents (if its safe or if you don't need their money any more) tell co-workers who don't know etc, they vote for us 2 to 1 if they know they know one of us. Finally register to vote, make sure all your friends particularly if you're young are registered and vote, vote in every election. Trust me it's AMAZINGLY easy to find the email of candidates for school board or city council and it's amazingly easy to ask questions. Last election I emailed every school board candidate about Holocaust education, and the state rep candidate about trans rights, she wrote me back a lovely note and mailed be a sticker she'd picked up from a trans rights group. It's amazingly easy to get involved, I volunteered with my local democrats for one election and they offered me the #3 spot in their local party, I have the phone numbers of my state rep and state senator without trying really, you can get in the room with these people, with candidates for governor, congress, I have my picture with 3 US Presidents? its not hard to do, and you can use chances like that to talk to them and show them your humanity and leave an impression that really matters in the long run.

sorry to RAMBLE but it's important that everyone do their part, pick a little something, a project to push this thing forward, people doom scrolling, particularly posting about how its hopeless does not help, posting in general doesn't help much even if its not doomerism, I think in the years after the anti-gay marriage Bush backlash we got very online and we got very "progress just happens" and a lot of people fell out of the habit or came of age without the habit of protest and without a local queer community or local progressive community and its very important in the face of this to find or build those and also understand in some places its gonna be years of work to get where we want to go, but we will and it'll be worth all the work.

[al-the-remix]

Okay, after rewatching 8×5 this morning I really think anyone who's still handwringing over Buck and Tommy and their chemistry or their potential for this season is just making themselves suffer for no reason. Lou was great in this episode, the way both he and Oliver (and both of them in their scenes with Ryan) bounce off eachother so well and was so much fun to watch. The writers did a great job of establishing the boyfriends + best friend dynamic, as well as Oliver and Lou's acting choices in all their scenes together. I really loved how we finally got to see more of Buck and Tommy's dynamic as a couple, I especially loved the scene in Buck's loft at night, the way the communicate felt so comfortable and well established, it really boggles me that anyone didn't like that scene, I though they felt so tangible as a two people who've spent a lot of time in eachother's space, it was great. As well as the scene in the kitchen when Eddie is checking out Buck's boily face, I just loved everything about it, it established everyones dynamics with eachother so well. Also I thought the scene in the hospital and at the end in the cemetery were very touching. I'm just really excited for 8×6 and what comes next, both for the new Tommy lore and to see Buck and Tommy move past it as a couple. I really can't see them breaking up any time in the near future after this episode.

[shaydh]

People love handwringing about romances with teen girls falling in love with an older (possibly immortal and magical) man but as someone who was once a teen girl i will tell you I thought that boys my age were largely stupid and unimpressive and if you offered me that kind of romance I would have slapped it out of your hands and called you an idiot

[bestworstcase]

Do you think ascension can be reverse? Like if a person who died but don't want to change to someone else because he like his old life?

no. lol

the purpose of ascension is to change. you can’t go back. not "can’t" as in "not allowed" – it isn’t possible. the river flows to the sea, the rose grows and goes to seed, the world keeps turning, this is the most essential thematic foundation of the show.

this is not a hypothetical. like the red king tried to do exactly this—ascend without changing himself at all—and what happened is it turned him into a toddler. a diminished, stagnant, profoundly unhappy shadow of himself who drove everyone who cared about him away until somewhat helped him realize not just that he could change, but also how he needed to change and (most importantly) that he wanted to change.

It Is A Metaphor. it is a metaphor. ascension is a metaphorical realization of the idea that life goes on with or without you; you can embrace it and keep changing and growing in this continual journey of being alive or you can stand still and stagnate emotionally, but you can’t ever go back. in order to grasp what ascension is doing narratively, both in terms of how it services the plot and what the ‘rules’ are, you gotta understand the metaphor. and like, the thematic treatment of death more broadly. (<- failure to engage with these ideas is how we get the abjectly unserious handwringing about how ruby’s life-affirming experience in the tree “”glorifies suicide“” and whatnot. lol.)

also,

ascension doesn’t change you into ‘someone else’ – it changes you into the you you choose to be when you’re you, to phrase it the afteran way. you don’t Become Someone Else. you Become Yourself. you’re just who you always were, differently. you’re not what you were but you are who you are. (famously! they only repeat this like a million times!)

this is a critical distinction because it stands in sharp contrast to ozma’s situation (his curse changes him against his will into someone else) – ozma’s curse is a corrupted ascension forced upon him by the god-who-refuses-to-change and must be set right by restoring his self-determination. whether this looks like literally taking oscar and oz to the tree for help or some other method of liberating ozma from oscar’s head is devised remains to be seen, although i think the latter is more likely. regardless, the purpose of ascension narratively from this point forward is to 1. precipitate ozma’s healing and 2. resolve matters with the god of light (& darkness of dark hasn’t already ascended).

it isn’t, i can’t emphasize this enough, a ‘get out of death free’ card.

[olderthannetfic]

Real art is about creating art, not seeking validation. All of this handwringing over being too mean to authors in bookmarks or not giving them enough comments proves why fanfic isn't art: real art's point isn't begging for senpai to notice you, it's becoming senpai by creating something beautiful.

I get wanting comments in that I too was once a literal child in need of strangers telling me I was cool. But adults should know better.

--

As senpai in this scenario and as someone who's been to film school with its grueling critique sessions (much like fine arts school ones), I generally find the phrase "real art" to be a bit of a red flag.

If you, anon, were so secure in your art making, you probably wouldn't sound like this. A lot of art is about community, not just masturbation in a room alone.

It's a mistake to obsess over audience response instead of moving on to the next project. It's a mistake to want everyone to be the audience for your work. It's usually a mistake to fixate on making one specific person like your art.

But it's not a mistake to seek out other artists and like-minded audience members who care about what you do.

[spacelazarwolf]

hmmmmmmm i’m real fucking tired of jew haters lying abt me!

let's break this down, shall we?

white trans mascs like spacelazarwolf have no issue calling indigenous people "bone chillingly disturbing" for disagreeing with them.

actually i called what you said antisemitic, because it was. i called what i've witnessed from gentiles in general bone-chillingly disturbing and cruel, and that i've witnessed so much ignorance, hostility, and bloodlust from gentiles. because i keep seeing posts celebrating the massacre that happened on the 7th, and i keep getting anons that tell me "hitler missed one", "the world would be better off without your ilk", "we should have gotten rid of you all ages ago", "die zionists rats *nose emoji*", and a lot of very graphic descriptions of how they would like to rape and kill me. one user, blatantly on their blog, openly said that someone should kill me, and someone said they knew where i lived and could make that happen. that's not disagreeing with me. that is bloodlust.

they pretend to care about racism when trans women engage in it, but have zero issue jumping right to demonic stereotypes about indigenous people who dare to point out that their support of israel is supporting genocide.

hey asshole. I WASN'T TALKING ABOUT YOU.

also. I HAVE BEEN OPEN ABOUT MY CRITICISM OF ISRAEL, MY REFUSAL TO SUPPORT IT AS A STATE, AND MY BELIEF THAT WHAT THEY'RE DOING IS GENOCIDE. YOU FUCKING IDIOT.

literally just blatantly lying about a jew's opinion on israel so you can harass and demonize them is, i hate to tell you, antisemitic.

these so called "anti-semitic rants" were me saying jewish people can survive without israel and do not need to colonize or genocide another group of people to survive.

let's give some of the highlights of your posts:

"while you're here hand-wringing about the safety of israelis and spreading the white supremacist lie that they must be in israel to be safe, israel secured its continued existence by just now murdering 500+ parients and doctors under the excuse of 'well hamas is violent and is hiding in there"

'handwringing' do you mean mourning the deaths of peace activists and children? also if you've read literally any of my other posts on the matter, you know i literally talk about how zionists institutions and leadership use jewish safety and antisemitism in the diaspora to bolster support for a jewish state. pointing this out isn't agreeing with it when you do it, why is it when i do it? what could the difference possibly be??

also, there has been no confirmation on who caused the hospital bombing. there are many reports that it was a misfire by one of the groups in gaza, and those are still being investigated. regardless of who fired it, it's still a tragedy. it's still hundreds of innocent lives lost. and it does not change the fact that the lives lost on the 7th were also a tragedy. using this devastating loss of palestinian life as a bludgeon against a diaspora jew for having the audacity to mourn dead jews is disgusting.

"[you] only bring up jewish people of color to argue that israel is actually not a racist project because israel is the only thing stopping jewish people from being exterminated."

literally just lying.

"jewish people in israel are behaving as and acting as white supremacist colonizers of color"

thanks for literally just outright saying that you think the problem is jews, not the state of israel.

"colonizers globally are constantly killing kids"

and therefore the israeli children who died don't matter? are you expecting jewish people to choose between their nieces and nephews and innocent palestinian children who are killed in gaza?

"[spacelazarwolf has] ranted and raved that without israel existing, the jewish people would be genocided. he's appropriated the struggle of indigenous and black people abroad to cry that jewish people aren't welcome in countries like the us, despite living in the us and benefiting from his whiteness and the oppression of indigenous and black people as many other white jewish people do"

i think you've made it pretty clear you're totally fine lying about what i've actually said regarding israel, but the idea that jews are "appropriating the struggle of indigenous and black people abroad" when we talk about experiencing antisemitism in the countries we live in is so???????????? also you make it really clear in this snippet that your issue isn't with israel but with jews in general.

"white jewish people...have been able to exist in relative safety for decades in european countries"

are you actually fucking insane.

"israel's existence has made things more dangerous for jewish people in the middle east and north africa because these are areas that HISTORICALLY had co-existence between religious groups"

nice historical revisionism! swana was safer than christian countries for sure, but it's SO clear to me that you know absolutely nothing about the history of the jews of swana.

"he and israel supporters like him are constantly distracting from the war crimes and terrorism ISRAEL IS COMMITTING by handwringing perpetually about 'but violence is bad and hamas is bad for being violent, the only good palestinians are the ones that are quiet and don't fight back against us when we kill their kids"

sorry, who's "we"? are diaspora jews killing kids? or do you just equate every single jew in the diaspora to israel? also, yet more blatantly lying and claiming i support israel when i repeatedly have stated i haven't! but it's much more convenient to claim i have, because then you can say that i kill kids!

there's a bunch of other times you repeat the lie that i support israel and "advocate for the continued existence of a settler colonizer state and lying and claiming it's the only way for jewish people to be safe" but i won't include all of those bc this post would be VERY long.

"israel supporters are really out here arguing that palestinians need to hold hands with their genociders and forgive them and find peace - completely ignoring that for centuries there was peace between religious groups in the region and israel destroyed it"

goyim being embarrassingly ignorant of jewish history outside of a warped view of the holocaust? i am shocked!

"the supposed civilians attacked turned out to be iof soldiers so yeah actually it's fucked for you to say. they shouldn't attack people who colonize and massacre palestinian people for their day job"

blatantly supporting the massacre of 1,300 israelis, including children.

"all they can do is fight back or die, while israelis grab their passport and fly back to the us or some other european country and wait for israel to finish their genocide so they can go back"

feel like i don't need to explain why. this is conspiracy theory levels of antisemitic.

"the crying and bellyaching that if the jewish people don't have israel, they'll have to go back to countries that are hostile to them is not one i have sympathy for"

yeah we know you don't have sympathy for jews, that's very clear.

"jewish people, black people, and indigenous people all still live there and survive and fight back and thrive in solidarity together. and they DON'T participate in genocide against other groups of people"

yet again making the blatant assertion that it is JEWS who are committing genocide, and not the israeli government. also let's not pretend that. there's always been perfect solidarity between our communities. jews have not always been the best allies to indigenous people and black people, and vice versa.

"there are other places to turn to if you had any interest in NOT participating in western hegemonic white supremacy. but instead of staying and fighting and existing and thriving with other marginalized people who are at HIGHER risk than you in these countries, you argue that somehow jewish people should be exempt from this work that every other marginalized community does"

shouldn't have to point out that i don't argue that, but also this is, again, conspiracy theory levels of fucked up.

"bonkers to watch israel-supporters screaming and crying that if they don't colonize and genocide palestinians then jewish people can't safely exist"

yikes.

"if it were remotely true, israelis wouldn't have pulled out their dual citizenship passports and gone back to europe and the us to wait at a distance for their government to finish the genocide they started in 1948"

again, yikes.

there is a choice outside colonization - you can just fucking leave and go back to your home countries that are welcoming you with open arms cuz you still have dual citizenship. you don't have to commit genocide colonize people to exist."

more yikes.

"spacelazarwolf really wants to try and argue that they can't stop colonizing palestine cuz if they do, they have to go back to - checks notes - countries where a ton of people still live"

who is "they"?

"for some reason [spacelazarwolf] thinks that to avoid going through [genocide], jewish people need to be allowed to commit genocide themselves and eradicate palestinians"

once again lying abt me, and also openly saying that they believe it is jews who are committing genocide.

"fucking bonkers that he thinks he somehow has the right to commit genocide and colonize to avoid the situation other jewish people, indigenous people, and black people worldwide find themselves in. cowardly bitch baby behavior actually. like i'm sorry lots of other groups of colonized people, who have been subject to genocide and violence, and racism and are still undergoing it, has managed to NOT colonize other groups of people for their own gain."

bc jews are just inherently more evil than other marginalized ppl, right? we're just more prone to being selfish and hurting people? we're just sniveling whiny bitch babies who will turn around and stab you in the back, right?

"screaming and crying that 'we need to be allowed to genocide palestinians or otherwise we have to go back to the us, where we as white jewish people never have to actually deal with the things indigenous and black people there do' is disgusting genocidal behavior. the thought of actually being in solidarity with colonized people is repulsive to people like spacelazarwolf - that's why they all seek to justify colonial projects instead."

again, conspiracy theory levels of fucked.

at no point do i engage in anti-semitism. all i ever criticize is israel.

don't feel like i need to point out that this is not true.

he has repeatedly stated that israel has to exist, otherwise jewish people have to go back to the us, where indigenous people are being genocided.

cool lie! also fucked up thing to say!

i've said nothing about jewish pain and trauma. in fact, i have said on numerous occasions that jewish pain and trauma are very real and that they DO NOT justify. colonization.

mmmmmmmmmm nah. "whiny little bitch babies" is not saying that "jewish pain and trauma are very real." also oops you accidentally did dual loyalty again.

but spacelazarwolf is so rabidly racist he immediately began fearmongering about the bloodlust savage knocking at his door trying to kill him.

i'm on desktop or i would include that mike wazowski standing meme bc genuinely what the fuck.

anyway, i have no doubt that their support palestinians is genuine. that's great. but it is also incredibly clear that they hate jews, and that is going to be a huge detriment to their activism for palestinians, and they're not the only one this is happening with. people need to figure that shit out on their own instead of harassing and lying about jews online and perpetuating this kind of violently antisemitic rhetoric. bc this is like beyond fucked. i am tired of gentiles blatantly lying abt me so they can get away with saying horrendously antisemitic things to and about me. get your fucking shit together.

[linkspooky]

Hot take of the morning: Should superheroes kill?

Every time I see a superhero kill a villain, I always see people respond with "Finally. A hero just kills a guy. No "If we kill them we're not better than them handwringing."

Which like okay, there settle down bro.

People always talk about this in moral absolutes though, like heroes shouldn't kill the bad guys because they always have to be better, or heroes should kill the bad guys because retaliating against violence against someone who's trying to kill you doesn't make you as bad as they are.

However, my answer to Should Superheroes kill is - it depends on the hero.

Batman's an entire character is written around how he wants to redeem Gotham and save the city, most of his villains aren't even sent to prison they're sent to Arkham a facility that's supposed to rehabilitee the mentally ill so they can rejoin society. Batman has decided it's his place to stop crime, not his place to decide whether or not people have the right to live or redeem themselves.

Batman is also at risk for being just like his villains, that's why he's foils with Harvey Dent, someone who tried to prosecute people under the law who then snapped and went full violent mobster vigilante. Batman actually is at risk for walking the same path as Harvey if he decides murder is an option.

What inspired this post was Rogue dropping Trask to his death from several stories up, which like you go girl. A lot of people on the internet cheered her on for not showing mercy.

However, in this case killing makes sense for Rogue's character. Rogue didn't start out as a hero, she was raised by Mystique and Destiny, she was a violent terrorist in support of mutant's rights as a member of the brotherhood of evil mutants. She eventually found redemption with the X-men and became a hero insstead.

It makes sense for Rogue's character to take a darker turn and start killing because she's been there before, and now her attempts to walk the high road only to watch people continue exterminating mutants has left her bitter and falling back to her old ways.

In one sense killing a man who made a machine that led to the massacre of mutants on Genosha isn't making you as bad as him, he's the violent instigator here. On the other hand, considering Rogue's past it's a sign of her mental regression though completely understandable because honestly who wouldn't get sick of trying to walk the high road when the result is remy's death and so many other mutants buried.

It's a part of a character arc.

If Peter Parker were to drop a man from several stories up intentionally, that would be a betrayal of his character. Peter never wants to kill his villains, he's interacted with the Punisher before and been disgusted with the guy, he thinks the Punisher is a bully that's barely any better than the people he hates. But it makes total sense for Rogue here.

[qqueenofhades]

Hi just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to thoughtfully respond to these anon messages. I work in dc w a fairly wonky set and i cant overstate how haunted the DC Professional Thought Havers are by the spectre of the "low propensity voter." I think these ppl (myself included LOL) thought we had everything figured out ahead of the 2016 elections and then never recovered from the way it ended up going......i feel like in all the years that followed.....the liberal bubbles.....the coastal elites.......the hillbilly elegies......the real america....the ohio diners....the pennsylvania diners.......the polls......the 2020 horserace....while part of an earnest attempt to understand What Happened, were primarily self-indulgent, self-flagellation for being "out of touch" bc of a self-diagnosed "elite" status that then turned into ANOTHER myopic view of the world, just opposite, where the "libs" are hapless and everyone else remotely to the left are primarily victims to the unstoppable supernatural forces of the Right. Then in 2020 the narrative flipped AGAIN and once again, instead of taking the opportunity to expand a worldview and having the bravery to confront their own shortcomings, the opinion havers and wonks and beltway pressers have decided to groupthink their way into writing off democracy altogether. Its BEYOND frustrating to see! Like damn volunteer at a soup kitchen or smthn instead of being obsessed w the fact that i vote lol

Yes, and there are several reasons for that. First, despite all the factors that contributed to Trump's shock win in 2016 (anti-Clintonism, white backlash to Obama, general low voter enthusiasm, Russian disinformation, etc) we should never forget that until James Comey decided to announce 10 days before the election that he was reopening the EEEEEEEMAILS case, even though we all knew there was nothing there, she was leading fairly comfortably in the polls. And while we will never know how the 2016 election would have gone without that, which imho was one of the most unforgivable acts of blatant sabotage by a public official in American history, it's also true that we saw her poll averages start sliding almost in real time, as people who hadn't really been keen on voting for her anyway decided firmly not to and Trump was able to scrape out 16,000 votes across PA, MI, and WI to take the Electoral College. Which... we all remember how we felt that night, right? (Or in my case, early morning, since I was overseas?) We don't, we really, really don't want to feel that way again. Just saying.

As such, the media (which had already beat up Clinton nonstop during the BUT HER EEEEEMAILS saga) drastically overcorrected and as you say, began writing endless angsty handwringing pieces about Trump Voters in Rural Ohio Diners and giving endless sympathetic airtime to how "economically left behind" they felt, regardless of the fact that open racism, especially Obama backlash, was and remains the principal animating feature of Republican politics (since their only economic platform is that which makes very rich people even richer and Democratic economic policies are the only ones actually targeted at helping ordinary people). The hangover was so strong that even when Democrats had a massive 2018 midterm result and flipped the House blue for the first time since the post-ACA backlash lost it in 2010, the Conventional Wisdom was now beyond any doubt that Democrats were doomed for a generation or something, and not that Trump had squeaked out a fluky win (while losing the popular vote) due to endless Russian/Comey/third party-etc interference and wasn't actually that powerful. Even in 2020 when Biden was leading fairly steadily and things were going to hell with Covid, etc. etc. TRUMP IS UNSTOPPABLE, TRUMP IS GOING TO WIN.

(And now. Like. I know Trump thinks Trump won in 2020, as do a large majority of his cultists, but that doesn't mean he did.)

Even after that, when Roe went down in 2022, that made no difference to the RED WAVE COMING!!! narrative, and the amount of smug white male pundits insisting that abortion just wasn't very important and people weren't going to base their entire vote on it reached truly disgusting levels. We're now seeing the same thing with the constant "people won't vote for democracy and/or abortion rights" blast, when as you say, this narrative has just been completely made the fuck up by a lot of groupthinking DC media who are determined that this time, Trump really is going to win and then they get to be principled chroniclers in opposition or something. Not to mention, the basic principle of "democracy and abortion rights are good" do in fact win by thumping margins every time they're on the ballot, including in deep red states. But there is literally not a single piece of empirical evidence despite the massive amounts of it supporting the truth (i.e. that Democrats are doing historically well in competitive elections since 2018 and there's not really a major reason to think this will change in 2024) that will get the media to change the "Democrats in disarray and Biden Iz Doomed" horserace BS they so love. They don't like Biden because he's boring and competent and just does the job without being insane, because it's totally a great idea to treat American government like a reality show! (Recall the infamous comment by the CBS CEO who literally said that Trump was bad for America but great for CBS, because he pulled in high ratings and therefore lots of money and visibility for CBS. We live in the worst timeline.)

As such, the mainstream media has a vendetta against Biden, is determined that this time Trump is super definitely going to win and everyone will see how genius they are, and not-so-secretly wants Trump back because a) he's good for money and ratings, and b) because the media conglomerations are owned by oligarchs who have a vested interest in making sure that Democrats and their policies never get too popular. Notice how the once self-proclaimed centrist independent Elon Musk has turned into a rabidly alt-right fanboy ever since the Democrats really got serious about taxing billionaires as a key part of their platform. Likewise, insisting that Biden Iz Doomed makes Democrats nervous (and thus more likely to tune in) and Republicans gleeful (and thus more likely to tune in), so there's literally no incentive for the media to even try to report things accurately. You could create a very different narrative of the 2024 election if you just remotely bothered to write about things that have actually happened as they have actually taken place, rather than bending over backward to insist that Biden being four years older than Trump is a worse crime than 91 felony indictments, 2 impeachments, 1 insurrection, 450 million dollars and counting in punitive jury verdicts, more major criminal trials coming down the pipe, and just demonstrably being the worst human being alive in so many ways. I mean. Wow.

The good news, as I said in my other post, is that when people actually vote, these utter bullshit narratives get routinely blown out of the water, and that's a good thing. Because it turns out that unlike Super Smart Beltway Pundits' Super Smart Predictions, the average American does actually like democracy and freedom for women to make their own personal healthcare decisions, and they vote accordingly. So while yes, it's being made harrowingly much harder than it needs to be because of how much the media simply refuses to report that basic fact, and there is no amount of evidence that will convince them otherwise, at least we're trending in the right direction and, if we all pull our weight, can do it one more time. I realized the other day that I hadn't heard a fucking peep about Ron DeSantis in the last two months, and oh, how glorious it was. I yearn beyond words for the day (God willing, soon) when the same is true of Trump as well.

[three--rings]

Started writing this last

I spent the six months before and the nine months after the 2016 election doing extensive activism, online like 16 hours a day compiling actions and protests and coordinating people.

And then I burned out hard, and quit, sick of everyone and everything in the left-leaning political sphere. Absolutely sick to death of the endless handwringing about which actions were actually good and which were problematic or ineffective and infighting over priorities and virtue signaling.

And I found refuge in Yuri on Ice fandom, which is when I started writing fic again for almost the first time in a decade.

And I look at the future here and I'm just so tired. Too tired to do that again. The world is so much worse now. Discourse is so much worse now. Politics has gone rancid. I'm too old, tired, and disabled to fight. And mostly I don't have hope like I used to.

I just feel like the most I can manage now is to maintain my own desire to keep living. I mean it's already the most I can do to keep us fed and our bills paid. I have a business I need to put more work on to bring in money cause see the cost of everything. I need to work on building strength so I can properly walk again.

You know? But I feel like I'm failing.

I'm already so, so tired of seeing posts about giving money to various (worthy!) charities as a way to do something, when I can't make it from paycheck to paycheck these days and cannot spare anything.

And I don't have transportation anywhere because I have a car that's needed repairs for almost a year now that I can't afford so I can't go and do anything. And yanno, it's gonna get WORSE for a long time before it gets better, now.

And I'm so tired of being so helpless and tired and I'm just that "man loses last little bit of hope he didn't even know he still had" meme. I didn't realize I had some optimism about my countrymen left but apparently I really did.

And I'm so so jealous of everyone I know in blue states. Who feel some comfort in where they are. I don't have any representatives to call! They hate me! They actively wish suffering on me and wish I would die! My neighbors are thrilled right now! My doctors will be celebrating again while I struggle to afford my care and I'll grimace and try to smile so I can continue living.

I don't know, I'm just...talking.

[idiopath-fic-smile]

Modern retelling of Much Ado, if you're interested and still playing the WIP sentences game? :D

still interested, still playing!

continued from this, which is set after this.

Margaret was finishing her sandwich and doing some light reading when Balthazar, Ursula, Hero, and Claudia burst in. She marked her page with her thumb, still chuckling.

“I don’t think we can wait longer to unveil the plan,” Ursula was saying. “Claudia, text Lee and Pedro, tell them it’s Go Time, we need to—” She broke off, glancing down at Margaret’s book and then back at Margaret’s face. “Were you laughing at Nietzsche?”

“Only the funny parts,” Margaret explained. She straightened. “What’s up?”

“What’s Go Time?” said Hero.

Ursula tapped the side of her nose. “We’re waiting for our co-conspirators.”

Lee slipped into the room a minute later, looking harried. Pedro followed on her heels, exuding a much more put together vibe, which was saying something because he had apparently come straight from the shower and was wearing only a towel.

“Friends, students, co-opers,” Ursula began, “lend me your ears. I need you all to come together to help me save my butt, and help Beatrice and Benedick realize they’re just nuts for each other. Which they obviously are, so this plan is clearly a net good, and we don’t need to examine it further than that.”

“Aren’t they, like, locked in enmity?” Balthazar ventured. “Also, how is your butt on the line?”

Ursula threw an obvious glance at Lee, who frowned. “As your house president, I’d say don’t anwer that,” Lee told her.

Balthazar glanced between them. “Is this one of those things I’d understand if I paid more attention?”

“Oh,” said Hero. “I don’t think so. I pay attention all the time, and I’m lost. Benedick and Beatrice?”

“Think about it, though,” said Ursula. She wiggled her eyebrows.

Hero shook her head. “Gross, she’s my cousin.”

“I meant romantically, not sexually.” Ursula wiggled her eyebrows again. “See? Romantic.” Wiggle. “Sexual.” Another, identical wiggle. “There’s nuances.”

“No, there’s not,” said Pedro. “They’re the same. Wait!” He leaned in to study her face. “Do it again?”

“Wouldn’t they be cute together, though, babe?” said Claudia to Hero. “It would be like one of those unlikely animal friendships at the zoo.” 

Margaret waited for Hero’s reaction, impressed with Claudia’s line of reasoning. Hero gave off powerful waves of someone who googled “unlikely animal friendships” every morning before breakfast and again before bed.

Sure enough, Hero clapped her hands together in delight. “Oh! Like a hippo and a tortoise,” she cooed.

Nobody else in the room reacted to this, or the obvious and confusing mental images.

“Who is who,” Margaret demanded.

“Can I point out the obvious?” said Hero. Margaret patiently waited for Hero to say, like, ‘my cousin is obviously the tortoise of the pair’ or ‘Are you kidding? Beatrice is such a hippopotamus, toe to tip.’ “They’re adults,” Hero continued. “Technically. They’re not—Barbie dolls for us to toy with.”

Margaret groaned. Trust the psych major to turn a promising performance art piece about the nature of love and facades into a bunch of handwringing about ethics.

“We’re not saying full-scale mind games,” said Pedro. “Just a little nudge. Don’t you think, under all that bluster, Beatrice and Benedick might actually—”

“Huh,” said Hero thoughtfully. “...huh.”

“Huh?” said Balthazar, at last looking up from his phone.

“Are you paying attention?” asked Lee. She sounded like she’d aged about fifty years since the start of the conversation.

“No,” said Balthazar. He held up his screen, where he had Spotify open to a new playlist he was making: CO-CONSPIRATORS.

[utilitycaster]

On the heels of your critique of C3's pacing and the sludginess of it all—something I have been contemplating lately is how the perceived need (certainly ICly and seemingly OOCly) for BH to move at a breakneck speed from event to event has had an effect on inter-party discussions and bonding that I find really pretty tragic. I can't help but wonder, would we be dealing with the indecision and rehashed circular debates we're seeing now if the party had been able to take the downtime they needed to really get to know themselves and each other, and to better define what's important to them? I often see people expressing frustration about how badly certain characters "need to TALK to each other!!!" but to date, I just don't know if the pace of the campaign has created many opportunities for that. And that's the thing I miss the most about the previous campaigns, just having more breathing room to let the characters and their relationships develop organically. I dunno. Increasingly I feel like these are interconnected issues.

I think I've talked about this before so I don't want to get too in the weeds but: yes. I think at this point Matt is like...making space deliberately for them to talk in-game, but at this point the party has spent so long not really talking and we're so late in the game that no one really takes him up on it or when they do it's the old Gods Debate again.

I really think the problem is once again what I've been saying for like, well over a year now. I don't think the cast was given as much direction as they were for campaign 2, nor was the campaign deliberately tailored to this party, so it has always been ill-fitting. Even some of the pre-planned elements have fallen flat (I have innumerable reservations about the Laudna book, but I do want to read it if only because I still could tell you basically nothing about her and Imogen's time together pre-campaign - it's one incident in Gelvaan, helping Zhudanna one time in Jrusar which wasn't even pre-planned but rather their "session zero", and apparently they saw someone with boob tassels one time). Things like Ashton and Imogen's relationships with the gods feel tacked on after Taliesin and Laura realized that having some sort of pre-existing opinion on the gods was in fact deeply relevant to this campaign; I do genuinely want an answer from both of them of whether "I had prayed to the gods and they never answered" existed in their backstories more than 5 minutes before it came up in game because I'd bet good money it was "no, I threw that in on the fly." So you have characters that are a little more broadly sketched, which would normally be fine (I mean, I don't think most of Vox Machina in the original birthday party one-shot had a terribly deep backstory to start), except for the fact that they never had to take watch, they had a patron giving them jobs and a generous stipend from the start of episode 2 until his demise in episode 38, and both Imogen and Laudna; and FCG and Ashton already had apartments in the city so no one needed to bunk up with anyone they didn't already know. The party did not need to take watches; they did not need to decide on a direction; and they didn't have to learn to resolve conflicts and make choices as a collective group. And yes, the pace has been pretty breakneck throughout, so there wasn't space early on for the cast to feel out their characters and what motivated them and how they'd act. I think the first time I saw a large number of people in the fandom going "MAKE A FUCKING DECISION ALREADY I DON'T CARE WHICH ONE" was with the party doing a similar endless handwringing about Dusk in episode 29, and I don't think they've really gotten better. Like, I do think episode 29 is already on the late side anyway, even for a long-running campaign with a lot of wiggle-room; for a long-running campaign with some very specific plot beats planned, this really needed to be done in character creation.

So now that there is more room to debrief and talk, because in-character they're still on a deadline and the world's been ending all campaign, and because that groundwork wasn't laid, they don't talk about anything except the task at hand. Like...I think a defense I've seen of this campaign is that it's about a group of people who really aren't suited for what has been laid before them, but the problem is that's kind of every D&D campaign that starts from a low level and this is a particularly weak example thereof. Vox Machina didn't show up ready to kill dragons nor Vecna, and the Mighty Nein are still Wildemount's best kept secret; both of them grew into their current hypercompetence. Bells Hells don't really belong to their story, nor does it to them, so yeah, hard to talk within that framework.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kelby Vera at HuffPost:

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) downplayed the drama that Donald Trump’s second term as president could cause, telling his fellow Democrats there is no need to “freak out” before the Republican has even returned to office. During a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week,” the legislator told host Jonathan Karl that he thinks many of his peers’ handwringing about Trump has been counterproductive. “I’ve been warning people, like, ‘You got to chill out,’ you know? Like the constant, you know, freak out, it’s not helpful,” Fetterman said. “Pack a lunch, pace yourself, because he hasn’t even taken office yet.” Asked for his thoughts on if the president-elect has the potential to be successful in his second term, the senator said that he thinks “rooting against” Trump would be the wrong thing for any leader to do. “If you’re rooting against the president, you are rooting against the nation,” he said. “I’m not ever going to be where I want a president to fail.”

“So, country first. I know that’s become maybe like a cliché, but it happens to be true,” Fetterman added. The politician also called Trump a “singular political talent,” commending his ability to rally his base.

“He had the energy and almost a sense of fearlessness to just say all those kinds of things,” Fetterman said, adding, “You literally were shot in your head and had the presence of mind to respond, you know, ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ I mean, that’s a political talent.” He also took issue with Democrats who have called Trump a fascist, telling Karl that it’s “not a word that I would use” before explaining further. “You put a lot of Democrats, especially in my state, that I know, and I happen to love people that are going to vote for Trump, and they are not fascists,” he said.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) went on ABC’s This Week Sunday to tell Democrats to “chill out” about the return of Donald Trump to office. Sorry, Mr. Fetterman, but that answer will be “HELL NO!” Tyrant-elect Trump should NOT be normalized!

From the 12.22.2024 edition of ABC's This Week:

See Also:

The Guardian: John Fetterman to fellow Democrats on second Trump term: ‘You gotta chill out’

[tinystepsforward]

ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".

like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!

on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.

returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body

literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence

[drtanner]

God. I'm pissed off again and you're all going to hear about it.

Some of you may know that I'm finally in a position to get my top surgery done on the NHS. I've been on their waitlist for a full year and it's finally my turn! But god, they're being asses about my BMI.

Some context: If you're trans, you can get top and bottom surgery on the NHS, but they have some really strict rules about BMI. Most top surgeons and all surgeons who perform bottom surgery require your BMI to be below 30. A few top surgeons will take you if your BMI is below 40, but you'll have to travel to see them and appointments are limited and hard to get. Over 40 BMI and you've got no options. The stated reason for this is that it's supposedly harder to get good results if they have to excise too much fat during the surgery. I'll let you decide how plausible that really is.

My BMI is a little over 40, by about 3.5kg, so not a huge amount. My fat percentage is a bit under 34, so it's not that I'm terribly fat, I just have a lot of muscle and very heavy bones! The surgeon himself - as well as every other medical professional who sees me - was surprised at how heavy I am given my size when he examined me last year and took Before pictures. My upper body is actually very lean and they know this because they've seen me! However, they're still being shits about my BMI, because BMI doesn't discriminate between muscle and fat, or how broad someone is, or how heavy their bones are or anything else, and apparently that's the only metric they go by. I've always had difficulty losing weight, probably because there really isn't that much to lose, so being told that I've now got to find a way to lose at least 3.5kg by October or have my surgery date pushed back isn't ideal and I'm getting really strung out about it. I've spent most of the last 15 years trying to get my BMI down without losing the muscle I worked so hard to build up or cut my leg off with fuck all success. I've been stable at my current weight for most of the last decade but now I have to figure out how to drop down to 121.5kg within three months.

The amount of hoops one has to jump through to get access to any kind of trans healthcare is absolutely ridiculous, a direct result of all the stupid handwringing about "permanent, irreversible surgeries!!!" and so on, as if I can't make choices about my own body.

Only, all of this bullshit about my weight and my BMI reminded me of something else: About ten years ago, when I was also getting shit about my weight (again, despite not being terribly fat, just heavy!), I got referred to a weight clinic. After seeing dieticians and being put on a drastically restricted calorie intake to no avail, I got shuffled off to the weight clinic, where they did the same blood tests that my GP had done before she referred me, saw that they came back normal again, unsurprisingly, and then promptly offered me bariatric surgery.

This was presented as the only treatment they were able to give to help me with my weight loss, to cut out part of my stomach and staple it back together to make it much, much smaller, because they didn't believe me when I told them I was controlling my diet. Like, oh yes, you say you aren't overeating all the time, but just to make sure you can't eat too much, we're going to make your stomach tiny so that you physically cannot fit food into it anymore. I've never heard anything good about bariatric surgery from anyone who had it. Every story is a horror story, from people who can't eat without stomach pain anymore, or keep down anything heavier than soup anymore, or who suffered through all of this only for what little weight they lost to come back in a few years' time. That was the only help they were willing to offer me.

I got up and left, and didn't go back again after that.

So, contrast these two situations. On one hand, I'm grappling with the NHS over my top surgery for entirely stupid reasons because it's ludicrously difficult to access any kind of trans healthcare, but especially surgeries, because they're "permanent and irreversible!!!" and "you might regret it!!!!" or whatever. Meanwhile, they couldn't throw bariatric surgery at me hard enough, just because my BMI was high. Is cutting out a huge piece of my stomach to make it smaller not "permanent or irreversible"? Might I not regret that? Especially when there's no guarantee that it would achieve the desired result at all? I know what I'm likely to get from the top surgery, but somehow that's the one nobody wants me to have.

Anyway, sorry about the long post. It's a fucking dogshit situation and I'm fucking sick of it.

[kittenfangirl20]

*Lucifer started to notice that Adam would carry a piece of paper in his pocket ever since he realized that he was pregnant with Lucifer’s children, every once in a while Adam remove the piece of paper and smile at it before putting it back in his pocket, Lucifer was curious about it and decided to ask about it*

Lucifer: So what is that little piece of paper for?

*Adam blushed and pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to Lucifer, on it in Adam’s handwringing was the note “Luke for a boy and Lyra for a girl,” Lucifer’s heart melted, Adam had already picked out baby names early on, he was always putting thought behind picking out names for things*

Adam: I picked Luke because it is pretty close to your name because it means light-giving and you are the light bearer. Lyra is connected to my love of music because it is connected to a harp or lyre.

Lucifer: They are both beautiful names and I love why you picked them. It looks like we will be using both names since I was able to tell you are carrying twins a boy and a girl even at such an early stage.

*Adam had such a bright and beautiful smile as Lucifer touched his stomach, the former Angel of Light just focused on the two lives growing inside of Adam, they were like two glowing lights filled with life, he also imagined Adam with a pregnant belly and it was the most beautiful sight he could imagine, he couldn’t wait to meet Luke and Lyra Morningstar*